‘So are you listening’ – the man with the bug eyes tried, unsuccessfully, to pick up his conversation with the barber – ‘to what she’s telling me, my daughter? That they’ve decided to call my granddaughter, who’s just been born, they’re going to call her Beverly, and why? Just because. That’s what her older sisters want, and –’
But his words hung empty in the room, condensing like vapor touching the cold. He went mute with embarrassment, suddenly conscious of his own baldness, as if something were dripping onto it. The men glanced at the girl, and then at each other, their glances quickly weaving strings of agreement. She’s not okay, this girl, their looks said, she’s not in the right place, and she herself isn’t right. The barber worked silently, and once in a while looked in the mirror. He saw her quiet blue eyes, and the knuckles of his fingers went weak.
‘Enough, Shimek,’ he said, in a strangely tired voice, to the man who had gone silent long before. ‘Tell me later.’
Tamar pulled her hair together and brought it in front of her nose and mouth, tasted it, smelled it, and kissed it goodbye, missed it already, its warm touch, the times it had tickled her neck, the weight it had when she pulled it up, the feeling that her hair made her bigger, enlarged her existence and her physical reality in the world.
‘Take it all off,’ she told the barber, when her turn arrived.
‘Everything?’ His thin voice curled up at its edges in amazement.
‘Everything.’
‘Wouldn’t that be a shame?’
‘I asked you to take it all off.’
The two men who had entered the barbershop after her straightened up. The third, Shimek, burst into a choking cough.
‘Sweetie,’ the barber sighed, and a slight vapor misted over his glasses, ‘maybe it’s better for you to go home first and ask your mother and father.’
‘Tell me,’ she retorted, all of her being tensed to fight him, ‘are you a barber or a school counselor?’ Their eyes dueled with each other in the mirror. This toughness was new to her as well. She didn’t enjoy it, but it was tremendously useful in the places she’d been hanging around lately. ‘I’m paying for this, aren’t I? I asked you to take it all off. End of story.’
The barber tried to object: ‘But this is a man’s barbershop.’
‘Then shave my head,’ she said irritably. She folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes.
The barber looked helplessly at the men sitting on the chairs behind her. His eyes said, ‘You’re witnesses – I tried to persuade her not to cut her hair. From this point on, she is solely responsible for whatever happens!’ and the men’s eyes agreed. He passed his hands over his thin hair and pulled his shoulders back. He then held his big scissors, snipped at the air once or twice; he felt that something in the clacking sound was a little off, it sounded hollow and weak, so he snipped and snapped until it hit the correct pitch, the sound of the joy of his profession – then took one thick curl of hair, wavy and black as coal, sighed, and started cutting.
She didn’t open her eyes, not even when he moved to the more delicate scissors, nor later, when he used the electric razor, and not even after that, when he made the last remaining hairs on her neck disappear with a sharp blade. She didn’t see the men, focused on her, as one after another they put their newspapers down and leaned forward a little, looking, alternately, attracted to and appalled by the too-pink naked skull, like a chick, becoming exposed. On the floor lay the beheaded locks, and the barber watched carefully so as not to step on them. The room was pretty warm and stuffy, but she felt the air around her head become cool. Maybe this won’t be so bad, she thought, and for a moment a smile passed over her lips. She heard Halina, her old voice teacher, who sometimes scolded her for neglecting herself: ‘Hair needs attention, too, Tamileh! Treat it well and you are already happier, yes? Why not? You can do it – a little conditioner, some cream – it’s not so terrible to be pretty . . .’
‘That’s it,’ the barber whispered, and went to clean the blade with cotton balls soaked in alcohol, and messed around with his scissors’ case. Anything, anything so he could stand with his back to her when she opened her eyes.
She opened them abruptly and saw an ugly, scared little girl. It was almost horrifying. She saw a girl from an institution, a street girl, a crazy girl. The girl’s ears were too pointy, her nose too long, and she had huge eyes strangely set at a distance from each other. She’d never noticed how odd her eyes looked, and now the exposed, provocative gaze frightened her. Her first thought was of the sudden resemblance to her father, especially his features as he had aged in the past few years. Her second thought was that with the addition of some suitable clothes, further blurring her appearance like this, there was a chance that even her parents wouldn’t recognize her if they accidentally passed her in the street.
In the barbershop, nobody was moving yet. She looked at herself for a long time with no mercy. Her naked head looked like an exposed stump to her. She had the feeling that now everyone could read her thoughts.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ she heard the barber murmur, with compassion, from afar. ‘At your age, it grows quickly.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said immediately, alert, refusing any tenderness that could crumple her; even her voice sounded different to her without her hair, higher, as if it had split into a few different tones and were coming to her from a new place.
When she paid the barber, he took the money with the tips of his fingers. She thought he was afraid she’d touch him. She strode slowly, very erect, as if balancing a vase on her head. New feelings arose from every move she made, and she actually liked it; the world’s air moved in a strange dance around her head, as if coming closer to see who she was, retreating and then returning to touch.
She lifted the backpack onto her shoulders, took the tape player, and began to leave. She stopped for a moment at the door; an experienced stage animal of her kind knew that, in addition to everything else, she was in the middle of a performance. They saw a spectacle, frightening perhaps, but mesmerizing as well. She couldn’t resist the temptation – she stood up tall, threw her head as if shaking back a grand mane of hair, a diva, and, with a gesture of grandeur, of a soul in storm, of Tosca in the final act before she jumps off the roof, she lifted her arm above her head, let it linger in the air, and then, and only then, did she walk out, slamming the door.
‘Mushrooms or olives?’
He didn’t know exactly when it had happened. When had Theodora stopped being suspicious of him, and how had he now come to be sitting in front of her, big fork in hand, preparing to eat the pizza? He was only vaguely aware of that moment – something happened in the room a few minutes ago, a different look passed over her eyes, and then a little door in her was open to him.
‘Dreaming again?’
Assaf said, ‘Mushroom-and-onion,’ and she laughed to herself. ‘Tamar likes olives, and you, mushrooms. She, cheese, and you, onions. She is little, and you are Og, King of Bashan. She speaks, and you are silent.’
He blushed.
II
THE GIANT WORE A black net tank top and held a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He was talking into two telephones at the same time: into the one on the table, he yelled, ‘I told you a hundred times already! Always check in the morning! So check the sack in the other car to see if he took the knives!’; into the other one, a cell phone, he said, ‘So where am I gonna find you a glass box now?’ He lifted his head and saw Tamar; without shifting his gaze from her, he slowly moved the toothpick in his mouth from left to right.
Tamar stood still. Her hands gripped the stitches of the overalls bottoms. She had met so many shady, sinister people in the past few weeks, and every time she got scared, she calmed herself down by thinking that they were only the preface to him, that she should save her fear for the crucial moment. Now, standing in front of him, she was surprised – he seemed almost harmless, a kind of huge, fat, sweaty teddy bear. But she still couldn�
�t keep her legs from shaking.
He wore a thick black ring on one of his fingers, and Tamar was hypnotized by his pinky, with its long talonlike nail. She wondered if the call that had brought her here had been made on the telephone on this table, if it was in this room that those fists had struck, and if that horrible cry had come from here.
The old man and woman, his father and mother, hovered around him; they presented Tamar to him while he spoke on the phone, then smiled at him from either side of her, a suggestive smile, one that held a promise, as if they had bought him a precious gift. He was taller than both of them, even sitting; he filled the room with his body, making Tamar feel odd – her tininess felt ridiculous. The names ‘Meir’ and ‘Ya’akov’ were hanging on a golden chain that fell on his wide chest – probably the names of his children – along with something that looked like an animal’s long tooth. Into one telephone he snapped, ‘Just watch him – keep an eye on how he throws – he already screwed up on me, cut someone the day before yesterday in Akko,’ and into the other he growled, ‘And the lunatic can’t just get into a wooden box, or some cardboard from the supermarket?’
Dinka sat, uneasy, at her feet. Shifting position now and then, Dinka then stood, something she didn’t usually do when she waited for a long time. Tamar looked around carefully: a big metal cabinet to her right. Bars on the windows. A torn poster, half falling off the wall. ‘You wanted to blow your mind? Well, you blew it.’ The man finished one conversation with: ‘I’ll tell you one more time – you will check, the whole time, that no one’s behind him, so no one ends up with a knife in his head.’ He had a bald red spot on the crown of his head, a long braid down his back, and heavy, dark bags under his eyes. He hung up one receiver, and the muscles moving under the skin of his arms looked like bread loaves. Into the other telephone: ‘Then go to a pet store – there’s probably something over there in the mall. Buy her an aquarium, let’s see her squeeze into that – just don’t forget to bring me a receipt!’ He exhaled slowly, as if to say, ‘I have to think of everything,’ looked at Tamar, and asked what she could do.
Tamar swallowed. She could sing.
‘Louder, I can’t hear you!’
She could sing, she sang in a chorus for three years, she was a soloist, or at least she had been, she corrected herself silently, until the trip to Italy.
‘They told me you sing in Ben Yehuda Street. Is that true?’
She nodded. Two scratched-up photos were stuck up on the wall behind him. He seemed twenty years younger in them, almost naked: red, shiny, and wrestling with another man, probably in some competitive match.
‘So what’s the deal – you ran away from home?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, okay, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. How old?’
‘Sixteen.’ Today.
‘You came here of your free will, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nobody forced you to come, right?’
‘Yes.’
He took papers and thick books out of the crammed drawer in his desk, looked through them until he found a page with faded printed letters on it, a copy of a copy. She read: I, the undersigned, am honored to announce that I have come to Mr Pesach Bet Ha Levi’s Home for Artists of my own free will and volition, and under no outside influence; and herein commit to honoring the rules and regulations of this organization, and to obey the management.
‘Sign here.’ He pointed it out with a thick red finger. ‘First and last name.’
A moment of hesitation. Tamar Cohen.
Pesach Bet Ha Levi peered down and read it. ‘Everyone suddenly becomes “Cohen” around here,’ he said. ‘Who are you kidding – show me ID.’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘So some other proof, something.’
‘I have nothing. I got out fast and I didn’t take anything with me.’
He cocked his huge head in doubt. After a moment he decided to let it go. ‘Fine, we’ll keep it like this for now. All right: I can provide you a place to sleep, a room and a bed. Two meals every day, one in the morning and hot in the evening. The money you earn from singing you give the home to pay for your food and rent. You get thirty shekels a day from me, for smokes and sodas and other petty cash. But I’m warning you, nicely, don’t even think about slipping one over on me. Want to know why?’
Tamar asked why.
He tilted his head back slightly and smiled beyond the toothpick at her. ‘You look like a delicate girl to me, so maybe it’s better not to get into the details. The bottom line is: You don’t cheat Pesach. Do we understand each other?’ For a split second Tamar saw what Shai had been talking about, the quick, almost undetectable metamorphosis between the two completely different people inside him. ‘Not that no one has ever tried.’ His smile widened a millimeter; his cold eyes pierced her, deep into her soul, into the darkness of her secret. ‘There’s always one smart-ass who thinks he’ll be the first to succeed –’ She saw the curly-haired boy by the railings in the square, dragging himself along slowly, broken-fingered and hollow. ‘But whoever’s tried, well, let’s just say, he isn’t trying anymore. He isn’t trying anything anymore.’ His eyes, Tamar thought anxiously, something is wrong with his eyes. They’re not connected to him. To anything. She didn’t know how she could stop the shameful shaking of her legs.
‘Get a blanket and mattress from the last room at the end of the hall, by the electrical boxes, and look for a room. There are lots of empty ones. Food in the dining hall, second floor, every night at nine o’clock. Lights out at midnight, sharp. Hey – what’s the deal with the dog?’
‘It’s mine.’
‘So she stays with you the whole time. I don’t need somebody getting bitten here. She’s got her shots?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about food?’
‘I’ll take care of her.’
‘Good. Somebody explain to you what you do here?’
‘No.’
‘Later. One thing at a time.’ He returned to his phone, started dialing, and stopped. ‘One minute. Another thing: do you use?’
She didn’t understand. Then she understood.
‘No.’ He just better not look in her bag, she thought. She had half a bundle – enough for five days – in there, sealed in plastic.
‘You better not use here. If I catch you, even once, I’ll take you straight to the police.’
His mother, standing by his side, nodded energetically.
‘I’m not using.’ But he confused her, that was for sure. Everyone here used, that’s what she thought, that’s what Shai had told her on the phone, when he told her about this place and begged her to come and save him.
‘Because,’ Pesach raised his voice, ‘here we stick to art. You keep all the rest of that garbage out of here. Are we clear?’ Tamar was struck by the idea that he wasn’t talking to her but to someone eavesdropping, hidden in the room or beyond the window.
‘Wait, wait, wait.’ He put the phone down again. He inspected her. ‘Are you like this all the time?’
‘How?’
‘Quiet. No one can hear you.’
Tamar stood ashamed, her arms limp.
‘So how can you sing if you can’t talk?’
‘I sing. I sing.’ She raised her voice, trying very hard to fill herself with life.
‘Let’s see, then. Sing for a minute.’ He stretched out his big legs.
‘Here, now?’
‘Sure, here. Do you think I have time to go to a concert?’
She stiffened at the insult: she had to audition? Here? But then she reminded herself what she was going to do here and suppressed her little internal rebellion. She closed her eyes and focused.
‘Well, sweetie, do we have to bring in a warm-up act? I don’t have all day.’
So she sang to him. Instantly – ‘Don’t Call Me Sweetie’ by Korin Alal. She shouldn’t have chosen this song, but she didn’t even think for a minute – the song just burst out of her uncontroll
ably, like a shout. Perhaps because he called her sweetie so dismissively; she would never have dreamed of singing that kind of song a cappella, leaving herself practically naked in front of him. And yet – just because of the rage burning inside her, she sang brilliantly from the first moment, and the piercing silences between the lines accompanied her as well as an entire orchestra. She sang with passion, and moved in time to the music, and took the correct breaths, and she knew, in complete despair, that she was making her first major mistake with this man. She wanted to stop, but knew if she stopped, she would lose the chance to stay here. But she shouldn’t have sung a song like that, speaking so directly, provocatively, because when she sang, ‘Don’t call me sweetie / it gives me a rash / it turns me into a chocolate fish,’ their eyes were dueling, as if she had declared war on him. And when, in the song, she sang about the one who understood she had no choice but in the wisdom of the little flowers, it was as if she was revealing to him that she wasn’t only the delicate little girl he saw in front of him, that she was hidden under a false bottom. Why the hell didn’t she choose to introduce herself with another song, why hadn’t she started with something quiet and sad – ‘Evening Falls between Cypress Trees’ or ‘My Simple Coat’ – surrendering, yielding; why did she have to provoke him, to draw special attention to herself in the very first moment? It’s that curse again, she thought dazedly, while singing; it’s the arrogance of the shy, the hasty courage of the terrified. Because when he negated her with his ‘sweetie,’ as if she were just another girl, she simply had to show him what set her apart, within, when she was ignited to sing – when suddenly the singer, the one who can’t be scared off, bursts out of her like a torch . . .
Someone to Run With Page 4